The Goat Pen

http://nypost.com/2017/07/26/us-militar ... ts-troops/

NYPost, hardly a liberal rag, prof.

Nevertheless, you ignore Trump's treachery wrt the LGBTs. He basically screwed them in the ass bigly. That's also the case with coal miners, steel makers, and clothing manufacturers...but with them he's doing it slow-hand style.

The idea that everybody is supposed to enable other peoples' desire to "identify" as something they are not, is totally preposterous. Especially in the military:

"Alright you maggots, wake up! Get your asses out of those bunks and fall out for PT. Today we are going to do the usual pushups, situps, chinups and flutter kicks, followed by a 4 mile run. Fall out in five minutes . MOVE!"

Sergeant?

What do you want, dirtbag?

I wish to inform you that, after a long period of introspection and aromatherapy, I have decided to reassign my identification.

You want to do WHAT?

I am no longer Private Bill Smith. I am now identifying as Captain Jean Luke Picard. In accordance with my new status, I demand that you replace my fatigues and issue me a wardrobe of Star Fleet Captain's uniforms. Moreover, I expect you to give me command of a Starship. I prefer the Enterprise, but any Galaxy class will suffice.

And finally, I will henceforth be addressed as "Captain Picard," with all the honors pertinent thereto. I will no longer participate in PT as it is not commensurate for my new station. If you seek audience with me, I will be in my ready room. Good day.

Why you little motherf... what's this?..... A text from the base JAG office....They say that if you feel that you are Jean Luke Picard, then we must treat you as Jean Luke Picard. It says here we will provide you with the uniforms and title, but the Starship might take a little time. Would you consider a tank instead?

You haters! I'm suing all of you! Hare dare you commit terrorism against me like this? My gender studies professor in college warned me about people like you! I'm going to my safe space, also called the holodeck, where all the figments of my imagination will be nurtured! See you in court!

Dumb

Here is an article about the way Trump actually governs that is depressing and terrifying. You people who made this happen and continue to support it are irresponsible assholes who are a danger to this country.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/ ... hael-lewis

Jungle Rat wrote:Dumb

That's being kind which isn't like you.

I get all my life guidance and existential validation from Vanity Fair. And Rand Corporation reports.

There is zero chance you read either.

Today, I am identifying as Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia. Therefore, you will address me as "Your Majesty."

“Republican lawmakers have openly defied President Trump in meaningful ways this week amid growing frustration on Capitol Hill with his surprise tweets, erratic behavior and willingness to trample on governing norms,” Mike DeBonis reports. “They passed legislation to stop him from lifting sanctions on Russia. They recoiled at his snap decision to ban transgender Americans from the military. And they warned him in no uncertain terms not to fire the attorney general or the special counsel investigating the president and his aides.”

And of course they just dashed Trump's obsession with ripping oprama's name off of healthcare.

Better late than never, some of the GOP is finally showing a backbone against iLDouche El Supremo.

Trump voters have always looked at GOP lawmakers and see a collection of feckless lying self-serving cowards. That estimation just got cast into cement about 2:00 am this morning. Theirs were the primary asses that Trump voters elected to go to Washington and kick. He did, but apparently not enough to get their attention.

So now, Trump voters will get the attention of GOP lawmakers in the only way that politicians really understand. Congratulations, Democrats: you're about to get the Senate back. Bigly. I know I'm voting for the Democrat candidates for the Senate seat here in GA for at least a couple of cycles. If you give me a choice between a Democrat and a feaux Democrat, might as well go with the real thing.

Professor Tiger wrote:Trump voters have always looked at GOP lawmakers and see a collection of feckless lying self-serving cowards. That estimation just got cast into cement about 2:00 am this morning. Theirs were the primary asses that Trump voters elected to go to Washington and kick. He did, but apparently not enough to get their attention.

It's not that simple with healthcare. Trumpers liked the promise of jobs and upsetting the DC apple-cart but they were split on the medical side - many wanted to fix the ACA rather than blow it and Medicare up while giving tax breaks to the rich and the insurers and the drug co.s and medical equipment manufacturers and on and on.

We're headed towards Medicare for all. There'll be roadblocks and forks in the road galore, but it's inevitable. People on the right who accused obamacare of being a Trojan horse for universal healthcare were never wrong.

Good points. But Trump supporters will still vent their ire on the Republican Senate, if only to punish their collective betrayal of their own base. If they never planned on repealing and replacing Obamacare, then they shouldn't have campaigned that they would, and gone through all those theatrical votes that they would.

They just confirmed the worst suspicions that their base had all along. They will be held accountable for this. There is no point in voting for Republican Senators if all they do is govern like Democrats.

Bases can be fickle, prof. As an example, you yourself were once a member of George Will's base, so to speak.


WASHINGTON -- Looking, as prudent people are disinclined to do, on the bright side, there are a few vagrant reasons for cheerfulness, beginning with this: Summer love is sprouting like dandelions. To the list of history's sublime romances -- Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy -- add the torrid affair between Anthony Scaramucci and Donald Trump. The former's sizzling swoon for the latter is the most remarkable public display of hormonal heat since -- here a melancholy thought intrudes -- Jeff Sessions tumbled into love with Trump. Long ago. Last year.

Sessions serves at the pleasure of the president, who does not seem pleased. Still, sympathy for Sessions is in order: What is he to do? If dignity concerned him, he would resign; but if it did, he would not occupy a Trump-bestowed office from which to resign. Such are the conundrums of current politics. Concerning which, there is excessive gloom.

"To see what is in front of one's nose," George Orwell wrote, "needs a constant struggle." An unnoticed reason for cheerfulness is that in one, if only one, particular, Trump is something the nation did not know it needed -- a feeble president whose manner can cure the nation's excessive fixation with the presidency.

Executive power expanded, with only occasional pauses (thank you, Presidents Taft and Coolidge, of blessed memory), throughout the 20th century and has surged in the 21st. After 2001, "The Decider" decided to start a preventive war and to countenance torture prohibited by treaty and statute. His successor had "a pen and a phone," an indifference to the Constitution's Take Care Clause (the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed") and disdain for the separation of powers, for which he was repeatedly rebuked by the Supreme Court.

Fortunately, today's president is so innocent of information that Congress cannot continue deferring to executive policy-making. And because this president has neither a history of party identification nor an understanding of reciprocal loyalty, congressional Republicans are reacquiring a constitutional -- a Madisonian -- ethic. It mandates a prickly defense of institutional interests, placing those interests above devotion to parties that allow themselves to be defined episodically by their presidents.

Furthermore, today's president is doing invaluable damage to Americans' infantilizing assumption that the presidency magically envelops its occupant with a nimbus of seriousness. After the president went to West Virginia to harangue some (probably mystified) Boy Scouts about his magnificence and persecutions, he confessed to Ohioans that Lincoln, but only Lincoln, was more "presidential" than he. So much for the austere and reticent first president, who, when the office was soft wax, tried to fashion a style of dignity compatible with republican simplicity.

Fastidious people who worry that the president's West Virginia and Ohio performances -- the alpha male as crybaby -- diminished the presidency are missing the point, which is: For now, worse is better. Diminution drains this office of the sacerdotal pomposities that have encrusted it. There will be 42 more months of this president's increasingly hilarious-beyond-satire apotheosis of himself, leavened by his incessant whining about his tribulations (What dunce saddled me with this silly attorney general who takes my policy expostulations seriously?). This protracted learning experience, which the public chose to have and which should not be truncated, might whet the public's appetite for an adult president confident enough to wince at, and disdain, the adoration of his most comically groveling hirelings.

Speaking of Scaramucci, and in his defense: His love interest, the president, was elected for his persona rather than his principles. Hence there is a vacuum at the center of the person who is at the center of the country's absurdly president-centric conception of government. Therefore, loyalty inevitably manifests itself as sycophancy. Nevertheless, the smitten Scaramucci is himself evidence of something encouraging: Upward social aspiration is still as American as Jay Gatsby.

When plighting his troth to Trump, Scaramucci repeatedly confessed his "love" for his employer, thereby exceeding Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin's comparatively pallid testimonial to the president's "superhuman" health. Scaramucci grew up in Port Washington, the Long Island community that is East Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." Gatsby lived in West Egg, yearning to live across the water, where shone the beckoning green light at the end of Daisy's dock. Scaramucci's ascent to a glory surpassing even that available in East Egg shows that the light on the lectern in the White House press room is, at last, something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.


georgewill@washpost.com

Professor Tiger wrote:Good points. But Trump supporters will still vent their ire on the Republican Senate, if only to punish their collective betrayal of their own base. If they never planned on repealing and replacing Obamacare, then they shouldn't have campaigned that they would, and gone through all those theatrical votes that they would.

They just confirmed the worst suspicions that their base had all along. They will be held accountable for this. There is no point in voting for Republican Senators if all they do is govern like Democrats.

Nothing will change. The "base" is still a bunch of ignorant, racist, losers and Trump will still appeal to you guys more than anyone else. You'll shrug this off and carry on with your disgusting and destructive agenda.

http://nypost.com/2017/07/28/couple-...-their-deaths/

have to wonder what hell they were going through

Tick, I still like George Will, peace be upon him, sort of. I do disagree with him on some things, but that is to be expected. I don't agree with anybody %100 of the time.

Crash, that link didn't work, at least for me.

Cletus, at what point in your life did your dude parts turn inside out?

Remember, I'm the heathen and he's the religious guy.

Cletus wrote:

Professor Tiger wrote:Good points. But Trump supporters will still vent their ire on the Republican Senate, if only to punish their collective betrayal of their own base. If they never planned on repealing and replacing Obamacare, then they shouldn't have campaigned that they would, and gone through all those theatrical votes that they would.

They just confirmed the worst suspicions that their base had all along. They will be held accountable for this. There is no point in voting for Republican Senators if all they do is govern like Democrats.

Nothing will change. The "base" is still a bunch of ignorant, racist, losers and Trump will still appeal to you guys more than anyone else. You'll shrug this off and carry on with your disgusting and destructive agenda.

Looking at the big picture, a good portion of Trump's base will need to be won back into some type of majority that can actually move the country in a positive direction. Rather than name calling and painting them with too-broad brush strokes, we need to be ready to welcome them back into the fold. Also, keep in mind that as much as Trump represents a dangerous descent into tyranny and fascism, he is just one symptom of the problems we face, and not the disease itself.

Trump represents a dangerous descent into tyranny and fascism

LMAO. Trump is SLOWING DOWN our previous dangerous descent into tyranny and fascism by the Democrats.

Look at what the liberals have already done to the Constitution.

First Amendment: Freedom of Religion. America was founded on the principle that you can practice your faith or non-faith without government harassment. Your side has already tried to punish people for simply believing and practicing what they have been believing and practicing for 2,000 years - forcing nuns to give out birth control, forcing Christian bakers and florists to participate in gay weddings, etc. The Mayor of Houston even tried to get pastors to submit copies of their sermons to her office for approval because those seditious pastors were preaching sermons she didn't like. That's the very kind of thing the 1A was written to prevent.

First Amendment: Freedom of Speech. Look at what liberals have done to freedom of speech in one of their homelands, college campuses. If you say anything that offends a snowflake (and EVERYTHING offends a snowflake), they will come after you. Colleges used to be places where speech was most free. Now, liberals have turned them into places where speech is less free than anyplace in America. If liberals have their way, they will impose the same speech codes on the whole country.

Second Amendment: Liberals hate it. If they had their way, every American would be disarmed. They don't like the idea of citizens a part of the population being able to defend themselves against crime. And they can't stand the idea of citizens being able to defend themselves against a potential future governmental tyranny from the left or the right (which is why it was written in the first place). Liberals want to do to the 2A what they did to the Tenth Amendment.

Tenth Amendment: Remember the 10A? That quaint little thing about any power not enumerated to the federal government is reserved for the states? Liberals have succeeded in completely nullifying that amendment (with little resistance from conservatives). Nowadays, ALL power is given to the federal government. The states are now only permitted to feed off the crumbs that fall from Washington DC's table.

In short, liberals want to turn America into another Venezuela, that formerly nice country that liberals turned into a socialist paradise. Those people are now voiceless, defenseless and voteless against a government that has completed the dangerous descent into tyranny and fascism, liberal style. Trump is trying to keep that from happening here. Good for him.